Why do we need Earthquake Retrofitting?

The Following is from an article I read on msn.com it was about the hazards of unreinforced masonry in earthquake zones.

In many vulnerable cities, people are effectively stacked on top of one another in buildings designed as if earthquakes don't happen. It is not the tremor that kills people in an earthquake but the buildings, routinely constructed on the cheap, using faulty designs and, in some cities, overseen by corrupt inspectors. The difference between life and death is often a matter of how much sand went into the cement or how much steel into a supporting column. Earthquakes might be viewed as acts of God, but their lethality is often a function of masonry.
"In recent earthquakes, buildings have acted as weapons of mass destruction," Bilham writes in the journal Nature.

Difficult to predict
For years, earthquake scientists have shouted their warnings about the strong likelihood that a major quake would level an impoverished city and kill hundreds of thousands of people. They have said, for example, that Kathmandu, where masonry structures expand so haphazardly that some eventually cantilever over narrow city streets, is every bit as vulnerable as the surrounding Himalayas are majestic. They have said that a million people could die in a major quake in Tehran.

What's impossible, however, is knowing precisely which of these cities will be the next to crumble. Or when. For all practical purposes, scientists can't predict earthquakes.

Now, I'm not saying that the Carnegie library building was built substandard, it was simply built before we knew steps that needed to be taken to keep a building from collapsing totally and thus killing every unfortunate soul inside. I had a patron ask why we were earthquake proofing again. I far as I know this is the first time we have ever had any work done on the building to stabilize it. She swears she remembers that we did work on the Carnegie building a few years ago for the same thing. I don't know what she is referring to but it wasn't an earthquake retrofitting like we are currently undergoing. We all know that our region is overdue for the next "Big One" so, I for one am happy that we can take these preventative measures to save lives and historic buildings.
Michele, Children's Librarian